Inexact Science : Past Summits Not Immune to Foibles, Follies
The last time there was a U.S.-Soviet summit meeting on American soil, Leonid I. Brezhnev arrived in Washington with all the trappings of superpower diplomacy--and a super case of jet lag.
His 600-m.p.h. leap across eight time zones and 5,000 miles in 1973 delivered such a wallop to the Soviet leader’s biological clock that a quiet Sunday in the spring sunshine, amid the flowers and songbirds of Camp David, was not enough to right the balance wheel. When he began his meetings with Richard M. Nixon, Brezhnev wore two watches--one set for Moscow time, the other for Washington--but he was still confused over whether it was earlier or later at home.
Brezhnev’s continuing disorientation led to one of the most bizarre incidents in the annals of U.S.-Soviet summitry and demonstrated anew a striking fact about those often historic meetings: No amount of advance planning can avert momentary lapses in decorum or keep Olympian diplomacy from sometimes degenerating into slapstick.
Subject to Chance
Wrapped in pomp and circumstance, devoted to the most momentous issues of our time, summits still have not been immune to the vagaries of chance or the personal impulses of the leaders who attended them.
From the first face-to-face meeting between the President of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union in 1943 until the bewildering conclusion of the encounter between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland, last year, U.S.-Soviet summits have had a way of jumping carefully lain tracks--in small ways as well as large.
In the case of the Brezhnev and his jet lag, just when he was getting oriented to Washington, a flight to Nixon’s Western White House at San Clemente hurled the Soviet leader across three more time zones. He went to bed when the sun was still above the Pacific horizon and the San Diego Freeway was suffering rush hour.
Bedtime for Brezhnev came only slightly later the last night of the summit, and with no one to talk to but themselves, the American summiteers also retired at an uncommonly early hour.
In his memoir, “Years of Upheaval,” then-National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger described what happened next:
“At 10 o’clock my phone rang. It was the Secret Service informing me that Brezhnev was up and demanding an immediate meeting with the President, who was asleep.”
All of a sudden, Brezhnev wanted to discuss the Middle East, which he had been brushing aside throughout his meetings with Nixon. Kissinger considered it a crass negotiating ploy to catch Nixon off guard, but the President was, nevertheless, awakened, and the leaders of the world’s superpowers sat down to discuss the Middle East in the middle of the night.
Extraordinary as the scene seemed, it was not all that out of character for summit meetings.
Traveling Circus
Nikita S. Khrushchev turned his 1959 summit trip to the United States into a coast-to-coast traveling circus that overshadowed his substantive meetings with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
President Lyndon B. Johnson and then-Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin drove a small-town college president from his home in Glassboro, N.J., in 1967 for a helter-skelter summit arranged on only hours’ notice. They met to discuss a Middle East crisis but came away with a communique on “The Spirit of Glassboro”--an important opening to arms control negotiations.
And President Franklin D. Roosevelt, eager for a direct meeting with Josef Stalin, came close to being killed when he sailed to a summit meeting in Tehran aboard a spanking-new battleship, the Iowa, in 1943. In the mid-Atlantic, as the President sat on deck in his wheelchair watching a defense drill being carried out while the convoy was underway, there came a terrified call over the loudspeaker: “This is not a drill. Torpedo on the starboard beam.”
An American destroyer escorting the President had accidentally launched a torpedo at the battleship. With bells clanging and the engines advanced to full ahead, the great vessel swung about to present a smaller target. The torpedo hit the wake created by the maneuver and exploded within sight of the President and the horror-stricken chiefs of staff of the Army and Navy.
As it turned out, a crewman aboard the destroyer, the William D. Porter, had failed to remove a primer from a torpedo-firing tube before the escort ship brought the Iowa into its sights as a practice target.
Assassination Plot
Once Roosevelt, Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had reached Tehran, the Soviets claimed to have uncovered an assassination plot, and the President, at Stalin’s behest, moved from the American legation into a villa in the Soviet compound.
The importance that Roosevelt attached to personal meetings with Stalin was demonstrated again a little more than a year later. When the Soviet dictator pleaded that doctor’s orders prevented him from leaving the Soviet Union for a second wartime summit, the ailing Roosevelt traveled to meet him at Yalta, on the shores of the Black Sea.
Churchill, who apparently invented the term summit before the Tehran meeting, proclaimed Yalta the world’s worst site for the climactic wartime conference of the Allied leaders. And he was not just talking about the bitterly controversial legacy of the decisions made there.
Although the principals found comfortable accommodations awaiting them, others did not. American major generals were lodged four to a room, and colonels more than a dozen. Many members of the U.S. delegation waited in line for a single bathroom.
In some measure because of the Cold War controversy that later surrounded the Yalta conference, postwar summit meetings between American and Soviet leaders have been choreographed with increasing care.
The planners, however, have sometimes been left in the lurch by their impetuous bosses.
On the spur of the moment in Moscow in 1972, Brezhnev ushered Nixon into his limousine and drove off to his country dacha, leaving presidential aides and security men behind. By the time the anxious staff got to the dacha, the Soviet leader had taken Nixon aboard a hydrofoil for a river ride that left the President’s Secret Service detail angrily stranded on the bank.
Khrushchev Antics
Even today, Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States is better remembered for the Soviet leader’s bumptious antics than for his talks with Eisenhower at the White House and at Camp David.
In Los Angeles, Khrushchev declared himself outraged that he was not taken to Disneyland, the American excuse being that his security could not be guaranteed. He pretended that he was offended when he saw a rousing Hollywood rendition of the “can can.” Then, professing to believe that a critical speech by Mayor Norris Poulson was part of a concerted campaign to needle him, he threatened to go home.
Reporters Threatened
Khrushchev later was pursued to Coon Rapids, Iowa, by hundreds of reporters who trampled over the property of Roswell Garst, his wealthy and dyspeptic host, who angrily hurled silage at the press corps and threatened to have them shot by Iowa state troopers.
And in New York, the Kremlin boss privately fenced with America’s leading capitalists in the drawing room of W. Averell Harriman, the wartime American ambassador to Moscow, saying he considered them the real rulers of the United States and the government in Washington more or less irrelevant.
In negotiations, he was as heavy handed as he was publicly outrageous. With his hosts still smarting from the launch of Sputnik, Khrushchev presented Eisenhower with a replica of a Soviet space probe that had hit the moon the day before his arrival in Washington. He pressed for an Allied summit on Germany and the status of Berlin. When he went home, the press wrote about a new “Spirit of Camp David,” but the first of the postwar summits in the United States was more memorable because of Khrushchev’s threat to the National Press Club that “We will bury you” and his baggy-suited journey around the country.
Johnson’s summit meeting with Kosygin eight years later has come to be viewed as a landmark in nuclear arms control negotiations, but like the Khrushchev meeting with Eisenhower, the extraordinary circumstances at the time overshadowed its substance.
Kosygin was at the United Nations, and both he and the President were anxious to talk face to face. The problem was where.
Poisoned Relations
The Vietnam War was raging, and the just-ended Six-Day War in the Middle East had once again poisoned relations between Washington and Moscow. Under those conditions, Kosygin considered it inadvisable to be seen in Washington. He suggested New York, but the White House feared that a meeting there would set off massive anti-war demonstrations and even fighting in the streets.
Officials in Washington suggested New Jersey’s Maguire Air Force Base or Princeton University. Camp David was mentioned. Resorts at Hot Springs, Va., and White Sulfur Springs, W. Va., were considered. None of them suited the Soviets.
College Campus Site
On a Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Richard Hughes of New Jersey suggested Hollybush, the campus home of the president of Glassboro State University, 15 miles southeast of Philadelphia.
University President Thomas Robinson learned from students, who had heard it on the radio, that his home was about to be the site of a superpowers summit.
Hordes of technicians arrived the next morning, stringing wire, installing telephones and stuffing a dozen air conditioners into windows of the 118-year-old house. Much of the Robinsons’ furniture was carried away, and their refrigerator was emptied. Before the day was over, the school president’s wife retreated to the second floor and cried.
Johnson and Kosygin arrived the next morning, the President swooping down by helicopter and the Soviet premier delivered by limousine.
The two leaders talked throughout the day, then departed with as much thunder and disorder as when they had arrived, leaving behind a stunned college town, most of whose students still had not arrived for the fall term.
There was a one-day respite while Johnson flew to Los Angeles to address the World Affairs Council, and then he and Kosygin returned to Glassboro to talk again in the Hollybush dining room, pausing long enough to barbecue lamb chops in the Robinsons’ backyard.
When it was finally over, little if anything had been accomplished on Vietnam or the Middle East, but Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara had engaged the Soviets on the subject of missile defenses.
It was the beginning of a dialogue that led in 1972 to the signing of the treaty limiting deployment of missile defense systems.
Something else at Hollybush also cast a long shadow.
In the Glassboro meetings, the Soviets contended that it was not reasonable to argue against defensive weapons, which they were developing, because their anti-missile system threatened to kill no one.
What followed in the succeeding several years was a massive U.S. build-up of missiles armed with multiple warheads to counter the relatively unsophisticated Soviet defense. That, in turn, was followed by a huge Soviet build-up of missiles armed with multiple warheads.
And last year at Reykjavik, when the Soviets attacked his Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan responded with the same argument Kosygin had used to support Moscow’s development of missile defenses 20 years earlier.
